Cubs TV voice Len Kasper, Twitter and 'the kinds of debates I hate'

“It’s just a conversation starter, and some of the reaction was great,” Kasper said by phone, which is still a thing people use on their handheld devices when they’re not pounding it with their thumbs, reading or taking pictures.

“Some of the ideas were fun, but some people got angry.”

Angry.

About the designated hitter.

So angry as to feel compelled to share that anger with the world in general and Kasper in particular.

That’s not to say it’s wrong to second-guess, which has been part of baseball since before players started wearing mitts. It’s the tone, the hard insistence among too many people that has taken what once may have been impassioned but good-natured give-and-take and left some on one side of an argument believing those on the other are not simply wrong but stupid, corrupt and/or offensive.

“I hope we haven’t lost the idea that when you throw something out there, when you don’t really know the answer, you’re just starting a debate as opposed to (saying), ‘This is what I believe, and no matter what you say I’m not backing down,’ ” Kasper said. “Those are the kinds of debates I hate.”

Even when someone such as Kasper is sure of his or her stance, there’s the same sort of stubborn, het-up resistance.

“Twitter lends itself to making very quick snap judgments about stuff that, in a lot of cases, just isn’t very accurate about the big picture,” Kasper said. “That to me is the big thing.

“I tweet that the Cubs are the best baserunning team in the league, and they are, and two days later they make two egregious baserunning mistakes. That doesn’t mean they’re not a good baserunning team. That just means they didn’t have a good baserunning game.”

Maybe it’s the zeitgeist. Maybe it’s the Bayless Effect.

That is to suggest perhaps a segment of the Twitterati is taking its cues from the professional arguers such as FS1’s Skip Bayless, who is paid well to poke, prod and bicker on TV and online, churning out hot takes with cold calculation, desperate to cut through the clutter and be heard.

Classic Bayless: “Think about this,” he tweeted June 3 (and the all-caps emphasis is his). “Chauncey Billups just said on ABC that LeBron ‘looked a little tired.’ IT’S ONLY GAME 2 OF THE NBA FINALS. I covered Michael Jordan when he was year older than LeBron is now. NOBODY EVER EVEN THOUGHT ABOUT MJ BEING TIRED. That would’ve been blasphemous.”

No one appreciates history like Bayless, and that is a good thing.

Digging out your copy of the Chicago Tribune from June 13, 1998, you’ll find a column about Game 5 of the Bulls-Jazz NBA Finals by some apparent heretic named Skip Bayless. It begins: “This will be remembered as the night Michael was mortal. This was his night, his game, his fourth quarter, and Michael Jordan got tired. No. 23 tried and No. 23 failed.”

Like Wrong Way Corrigan, accorded ticker-tape parades after he filed a New York-to-California flight plan yet landed in Ireland, Bayless is celebrated in some circles.

But Corrigan lost his pilot’s certificate for 14 days, a mere slap on the wrist but still a slap. Bayless just keeps jabbering away.

Over the course of a season in sports, the trends and statistics prove out. The guy who hits two home runs in the first series of the season won’t wind up with 108 over 162 games, no matter what pace he’s on, and going hitless on opening day is not necessarily a harbinger of a sub-.200 season.

There are injuries and streaks, hot and cold. Improbable heroes and upsets. That’s what makes it great. If it were all analytics and algorithms, the games wouldn’t be necessary.

“One thing I’m getting a lot is, ‘What do you do with David Bote when (injured) Kris Bryant returns?’ And again it’s a baseball thing where things tend to work themselves out,” Kasper said. “We don’t know when Kris is going to be back. If he’s back after Sept. 1, rosters expand, so Bote is still here. We don’t have to make those decisions now. Those decisions are down the road.

“I know it’s frustrating for fans when you can’t answer those questions immediately — you know, ‘What’s your playoff rotation?’ and ‘Who’s going to be your closer?’ All that stuff has to develop naturally over the course of time, but we’re in this instant-gratification mindset where we want to have all the answers to all the questions immediately.”

Saves time for those looking to immediately shred those answers as premature and ill-informed.

“As someone who espouses personal responsibility,” Kasper tweeted in a Thursday mea culpa (edited here for readability), “I accept full blame for saying the Cubs are the best baserunning team in recent memory. That statement directly caused a baserunning slump the last few days. I also take blame for a 9-0 loss after saying Kansas City had the worst record in MLB.”